Congratulations to a pitcher who has bounced around, had Tommy John surgery and threw not only a perfect game but his first career complete game. I guess that sometimes you just get in the “zone”.
I hope it doesn’t ruin his career. The WS are going to need some more wins from him.
Mets fans are going “D’oh!”
No kidding! The WS have had 3 perfect games in their history. In the Mets 51 year history they haven’t had a single no-hitter. However, there is a rich history of ex-Mets pitchers throwing no-hitters. Weird!
I was surprised to see the stat that the Sox are now tied with the Yanks for most Perfectos and tied with the Red Sox for 2nd with 18 No-nos.
Also, that 3rd strike call was totally bogus. And I’m not just saying that as a bitter Cubs fan who’s stomach turns at the thought of listening to asshole Sox fans at the bar tonight.
I think every ump is now thinking, “26 outs? 2 strikes? Close enough to keep me from being the next Jim Joyce.”
So how close was that check swing? I caught the final two outs at the bar, and didn’t even know what was going on with Jaso’s pop out and why everyone was cheering so loudly until I heard some “perfect game” chatter. Watching it live, it looked to me like Ryan held up, but the replay looked a lot closer to me. There was no audio to listen to, so I don’t know if it was controversial or not, so what’s the word?
Cubs fans will always have to wake up in the morning knowing that their condescension of the White Sox is totally without merit and that their soul is living with the Devil. Being a Cubs fan isn’t even a pact with the Devil, it is living in Hell. Cubs fans hate themselves. They only have themselves to blame.
In my personal experience, as a Cubs fan who should be a White Sox fan given the geography of his birth, that’s not really true. At the risk of falling into a “No True Scotsman” type argument, I never found that real Cubs fans ever gave a shit about how the White Sox were doing, yet Sox fans would criticize and condescend the Cubs every chance they would get.
So why are you a Cubs fan? The current ownership seems to have learned from the Wrigley’s. Why bother trying to win? We can make more money by losing because our fans are so clueless. We sell cute, not wins.
Yea, I read some message board right after the White Sox won the World Series and broke the Chicago curse. They acted like, no big deal, we don’t care. Well, that’s the ultimate condescension. Seven years later the Cubs still suck and the idiot fans still pay their money.
Because it’s the team I grew up with and I love. I blame it on WGN. When I was a kid, that’s what was on TV in the afternoons, as the Cubs didn’t play night games. I’m not even sure Sox games were on with any regularity, so far as I remember. My parents were Polish immigrants, so they could give two shits about baseball. I grew up with Harry Carey and the Cubs, and if I changed course at this point, it would be faking it. I grew up a Cubs fan, I am going to die a Cubs fan. There’s no condescension about the Sox. The Sox are fine with me. I’ve been to more Sox games than Cubs games due to where I live. They just don’t matter that much to me. I wish I could say I had some sort of attachment to them, but I’d be lying to say I did.
Of course, I should add, I was cheering for the perfect game. (I mean, who wouldn’t?) I’m amazed the Sox have had two now in the last, what, five years is it? That’s just incredible.
Have you come to sports recently? Seriously.
WTF is that suppose to mean?
It’s not impossible to change allegiance to a pro team. After all, you are cheering for someone’s business. It’s not like having attended a college.
I lived in Chicago. I could clearly see Wrigley Field from my window. When I got to Chicago I thought I was going to become a Cubs fan. At the time Harry Carey was with the White Sox. WGN and the Cubs stole him. He was not sincerely a Cubs fan. It was business.
I soon got so disgusted with the Cubs franchise that I would take the train to the south side to see the White Sox. The WS struggled for wins in those days but they had an excuse, they had no money. Bill Veeck still owned them and they were his livelihood.
I shake my head when I hear Cubs fans talk about the “revered” Harry Carey. The White Sox got him because the St. Louis Cards fired him. He was screwing Augie Busch’s wife. He fit in with the White Sox and became popular in Chicago so the Cubs hired him away. He was doing his shtick with the WS before the Cubs. He was an act, not a died-in-the-wool Cubs fan.
I’m not exactly sure what Harry Carey has to do with fandom. He was part of the image of the Cubs and the voice (along with Jack Brickhouse before him, and Steve Stone, Dewayne Staats, Lou Boudreau, etc. ) that I associated with the Cubs for the bulk of my childhood, but he has little to do with why I love the Cubs.
It may be a little different if you grow up with it. My earliest childhood memories include watching the Cubs games in the late 70s and early 80s on a black-and-white TV during summer vacation. (Actually, my earliest baseball memories are from even before when I started attending school.) Even though my parents never watched the game, there was something mesmerizing about it, and almost every afternoon I would watch the game. I especially looked forward to rain delays, where they would show old historical games from the 40s and 50s. The Cubs (and WGN) are how I learned about baseball and its history. I grew up one of the few Cubs fans in my Sox neighborhood. Year after year I would be playfully teased during the Crosstown classic (when the Cubs played the Sox in an exhibition game) as they lost every last one of them that I remember. The best they ever managed was an 11-inning tie (or something like that.)
Sports fandom isn’t exactly a rational thing. Why are most my friends Sox fans? Because they grew up in my neighborhood, and their families were Sox fans. I don’t know of a single Sox fan that has switched allegiances any more than a “born” Cubs fan has. I loved Comiskey Park (the old one), and the White Sox do have a special place in my heart as the first ball game I ever went to was there, and from grammar school to high school, I’ve probably been to 10 Sox games for ever 1 game I’ve been to at Wrigley. But the damage had been done by then. Like an incurable disease, being a Cubs fan is in my blood. I can fake loving another team, but it was be just that–faking.
No, it’s not rational, but neither is being a fan of sports teams in general.
Harry was at his best, broadcasting White Sox games with Jimmy Piersall. They were brutally honest and openly critical of WS players, when they felt it was deserved. Harry was often well-lubricated by the late innings, and he knew how to push Jimmy’s buttons to get him to rant about one thing or another. It was great entertainment, even if the team wasn’t especially good.
Jimmy talks a bit about the good old days in this interview.
Participating in this discussion, I suspect you’ve seen this You Tube video, but just in case:
Classic Chicago/Cubs/Sox
Humber should retire. Today.
You are certainly entitled and you did a great job of making your case.
The whole reason I dump on the Cubs is because I tried to be a fan and then realized that the Wrigley’s really didn’t care about winning. The Cubs were just a cash cow. I was there when Dave Kingman decided not to play for most of a season while he sat on his boat in Lake Michigan feigning injury.
At one point Willy Hernandez lived in my building. He roughed up a garage attendant because the he didn’t think the guy did enough to help out his pregnant wife who wasn’t even showing her baby bump. The condo board President called the Cubs front office and they absolutely didn’t give a shit.
Yes, the old Comisky Park was something. I had a lot of fun there. Trouble was, it was built on the cheap and really was falling apart. It had to be replaced.
So yes, I’m biased. But again you are fully entitled to pull for any team you want to. Personally, I make a huge effort to be very low-key about the professional teams I prefer to win. I know that they aren’t going to send a representative to my funeral.
I thought the last batter gave up too early on his run to first. Had he hauled ass, it would have been a much closer play and perhaps even had beaten it out.
I liken it to an old Catholic idea of The Age of Reason. At some point in our lives, we stop being innocent kids and start being responsible for our actions (turning 8 I think it was in Catholic Church).
At some point, we, as fans, reach the Age of Sports Reason, where the way we were raised or where we lived, or our growing knowledge of sports, lets us discern who we root for and who we become fans of. Once we learn enough of the world, once we pass that idyllic childhood time of blind, instilled fandom, we can become fans of any team, anywhere, no matter our upbringing. We get to choose.
My folks were Chicago people. Dad from the West Side, Mom from the South. From my first memories, we were Bears fans. I had the Bears helmet bank, the Bears poster of Walter Payton (I still love that guy), the Bears dufflebag to carry my Bears football in. I loved, without reason, Bob Avellini and thought Vince Evans threw the prettiest deep ball ever. I hated the Packers, Lions, Vikings, although I did feel a bit of pity for the Tampa Bay Bucs (back then they were in the NFC Central).
Then I grew up. I learned about football, other fans, frachises, and teams. I learned more about Vince Lombardi, Mike Ditka, how franchises are won, and what fans are like.
I reached the Age of Sports Reason. And, to borrow from the Bible, I gave up my childish ways and became a fan of the Packers. Haven’t looked back since.
You too can make that change. You can choose to root for the teams you want. You can choose to see the Cubs as the pathetic franchise that sucks the life and money out of its fandom that it is. You can look around you at a Cub game and realize “Hey, there’s 35000 drunk boorish assholes out to make everyone as miserable as they are here, maybe I should go somewhere else”. You can make a choice.